Inspiration
by Steelcircle
Summary: Scrapper disassembles a dead Autobot.


**Inspiration**

In the lull between Megatron's most recent plan and the next, Scrapper used the down time to indulge a "hobby" of his; scrapping and recycling defeated Autobots. He could and did indulge it on the job, but Scrapper was generally rushed at those times. Megatron loved to set impossible timelines, and the Autobots kept trying to nab his subjects. Here, in the relative safety of the Decepticon base, he could practice it at his leisure.

Scrapper stood before a table where the slain body of an Autobot lay. The Autobot had died of a head wound. Scrapper looked disapprovingly at the damage. The delicate neural circuitry would, in all likelihood, be damaged, perhaps unsalvageable.

The general design of the corpse did not lend itself to ready use for any particular purpose. The limbs would not make a good table, for example. The green and purple robot would simply have to disassemble the corpse completely.

Opening up the torso first, the construction engineer severed and tied off the fuel lines, and then, removed the energon tank. Scrapper would have to get Long Haul to take that tank down to the energon storage area, empty it, and return the tank to him.

Setting down on the floor and studying the fuel tank, the purple and green robot noted the strengths and weaknesses of the design. Knowledge was everywhere in positive and negative example. Every little flaw was a reminder to Scrapper of what he should not do. Every efficient design detail inspired him to do even better; to top it. Some amazing extrapolations could be made from Transformers to buildings, or perhaps, not so amazing considering the composition of the average Transformer: wires, sheet metal, etc.

The fuel lines Scrapper removed next. With the combustible parts out of the way, the construction engineer was freer to probe the prone form. Little revelations and reminders accompanied the disassembly.

Crystal City - had Megatron expected the Constructicons to refuse to destroy their creation? Crystal City was a commissioned work, plain and simple. Besides, they'd all had their little problems with the city.

Scrapper had never been happy with the crystal-like substance that composed Crystal City. He had a rather specific image in mind. Scrapper had seen an obviously custom built Cybertronian on the way to a job site one day. It was sleek, graceful, seemingly covered over in clear polychroic crystal instead of the typical opaque metal, and so very breakable looking.

Its beauty had obviously gone to its head to judge by the way the crystal-like robot had looked down its olfactory sensors at the "mere" construction workers. Bonecrusher had wanted to pound some sense into it, but it vanished into the crowd before the demolitionist could do anything. It had made lovely inspiration, anyway, for surely their city would be above the others as that robot seemed to think it was.

They hadn't been commissioned specially to make a city of crystals, merely a city of singular beauty. Crystal City was, indeed, a unique and exquisite city. No one would have ever known Scrapper's dissatisfaction with the crystal-like material. Mixmaster had never been able to perfectly replicate the crystal-like looks of that haughty machine, and Scrapper couldn't blame him. It wasn't as if the chemist had a chunk of that robot's outer coating to analyze.

Scrapper reached the damaged cranial area. Few parts could be salvaged here. Extrapolating what it would have been like undamaged, the construction engineer realized that a quirk of the transformation scheme left the head weak in places. The flaw was hardly obvious and would have been less noticeable had the Autobot been undamaged. With a bit of thought, Scrapper came up with a solution that might have saved the Autobot's life. He did a quick mental check of the Decepticons; did anyone share a transformation similarity with the dead Autobot? No. Still, the insight was one that couldn't be learned from any corpus, only a corpse.

_O Muse, I'll disassemble thee._

**The End**


End file.
